SMART: a scan-based movement-assisted sensor deployment method in wireless sensor networks

The efficiency of sensor networks depends on the coverage of the monitoring area. Although in general a sufficient number of sensors are used to ensure a certain degree of redundancy in coverage so that sensors can rotate between active and sleep modes, a good sensor deployment is still necessary to balance the workload of sensors. In a sensor network with locomotion facilities, sensors can move around to self-deploy. The movement-assisted sensor deployment deals with moving sensors from an initial unbalanced state to a balanced state. Therefore, various optimization problems can be defined to minimize different parameters, including total moving distance, total number of moves, communication/computation cost, and convergence rate. In this paper, we propose a Scan-based Movement-Assisted sensoR deploymenT method (SMART) that uses scan and dimension exchange to achieve a balanced state. SMART also addresses a unique problem called communication holes in sensor networks. Using the concept of load balancing, SMART achieves good performance especially when applied to uneven distribution sensor networks, and can be a complement to the existing sensor deployment methods. Extensive simulation has been done to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.